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alfgifu's avatar

Not to disagree, but to add - even where ordeals are not consciously seen as beneficial, it is difficult to direct scarce policy-maker time and attention, and money, into reducing burdens and making systems easier to access.

There is always pressure to be able to announce or roll out a new initiative, and the amount of labour involved in building systems that talk effectively to one another and enable automation is often invisible to a team of civil servants designing a policy and almost always completely unimaginable to the politicians directing them. By the time the practical challenges of delivery are realised, everybody is committed to unreasonable timeframes, and rather than step back and fix the access problems the tendency is to push ahead and accept a messy or poorly-joined-up system. And then of course it's much harder to fix later, particularly as waves of technical debt build up across government.

For this reason I find it frustrating that people keep citing the speed of policy-making during Covid as a good thing: the Covid solutions were poorly thought through (of necessity, there was no time), some were incredibly effective and some faceplanted at once, the situation forced people to experiment (which is good) but also pushed us towards short term solutions and a 'pay for it later' mentality which left everything vulnerable to being slashed back in a swing back towards austerity once the immediate crisis subsided.

During Covid we had to use the levers we had, which meant that some groups unexpectedly benefitted and others suffered not because of any intent but because there was no existing lever and no time to build one (such as the newly self-employed, who missed out dramatically on furlough support).

So yes, absolutely, let's be more joined-up and stop letting arbitrary cruelty cost us more in the long run - but to do that effectively we need to really get to grips with the technical and practical investment needed to deliver that smoother, more generous system.

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Jack Smith's avatar

Really excellent to highlight the empathy gap, Sam, something not discussed enough. I’d add it extends to a variety of other issues, and suggests there are bigger, wider problems with our political culture and systems.

An example would be medics going on strike. Now I think people are broadly supportive of, say, junior doctors. But I think a problem in the past has been little real, lived understanding of exactly how stressful the job is, and how bad the compensation is compared to it. We all know being a doctor is stressful but I think it’s hard to appreciate unless you work in healthcare or have a close personal relationship with someone who does. My partner works in healthcare, and even I struggle sometimes to empathise with her because the pressure she’s under is so extreme compared to anything I’m used to.

Something I’ve become uncomfortable with in politics not just in the UK but elsewhere is a tendency to generalise. There’s always this sense that there are ‘real people’ who need to be spoken to. But this is simply not true. We live in diverse, complex societies where people have very different professions, personal backgrounds and social relationships. We have to recognise that, and any political institution has to be able to acknowledge this diversity and represent it.

Maybe we need to find a way to bring actual people from diverse personal and professional backgrounds in, not just as elected officials but in a consultative and deliberative way. An example I think of is in criminal trials, where juries become more empathetic towards defendants after they’ve heard their side of the story compared to just reading media reporting of the trial.

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